Andre Cross
Andre Cross is the only character to be displaced from her original time in the past, 12th Century England, to the 27th century present. Biography Early Life (Taken from Book 1, 'The Ivanhoe Gambit') Born in the western Pyrenees, Basque country, in the 12th-century, Andre lost both her parents when she was only nine. They had been farmers. Her mother and her father had been hapless enough to slaughter a goat that had been contaminated. In the process of the butchery, they had breathed in the spores from the animal's hide. The same flesh, cooked, had not harmed the children, but for the parents, the die had been cast. Within a week, they had manifested the symptoms. Both had high fevers, their bodies racked with aches and pains as the infection spread. Their glands swelled, a fine red rash appeared, their blood pressure dropped and their lungs filled with water. They both became delirious, ranting for hours on end and hallucinating and finally, within another week, first the mother, then the father went into shock and died. Thus, at the age of nine, Andre had become both mother and father to Marcel. She even tried to manage their tiny farm, but the children failed dismally. Leaving behind their simple home, and their parents, whom Andre had buried in the field, they started wandering, never knowing from one moment to the next what fate had in store for them or where their next meal would come from. Those meals were few and far between. They got by at first by stealing. Andre wasn't very good at it at the beginning and she often starved so that Marcel could eat, but she got better. Their lives took a turn for the better when the orphans were taken in by an abbot who treated them kindly and taught them how to read, giving them what little education both possessed. The demands he made on her young body did not seem too much to give him in return. When he began to make the same demands upon Marcel, Andre decided it was time to leave. It was very shortly after that that she took to passing as a boy. It made things easier, although not by very much. They traveled constantly, stealing what they could to see them through. They both learned how to fight and they survived, although the odds against them were incalculable. Then they met up with Sir Giles. Andre never knew Sir Giles' full name. Giles himself, was no longer certain what it was. A knight errant who had taken one blow to the head too many, Giles was addle-brained without any hope of recovery. He imagined himself to be upon a quest and, indeed, when he had set out upon his journey from where it was he came, he may have had some purpose in mind, but he could no longer remember what it was. Though he was a lost soul, Giles was a gentle man who had brief periods of relative lucidity interspersed with fugue states. He was as sad knight, barely able to take care of himself. Frequently, he forgot to eat and he was given to experiencing extremely painful headaches. In spite of this, however, he was supremely functional when it came to exercising his fighting prowess. It was as though his body could remember what his mind could not. Whenever it came to practicing his knightly art or speaking of it, something inside him clicked and, for a time, he was almost normal. He had not seen through Andre's deception and he took her and Marcel at face value as two orphaned boys out on their own. They touched a chord of sympathy within him and he made them his squires and proceeded to instruct them. It was a touching, symbiotic relationship. They took care of him, and he gave them protection. When it came to instructing his two young squires in the art of combat, Giles was a relentless taskmaster. He transferred the feverish intensity with which he sought to grasp his past into his teaching and he rode them hard. Marcel, a delicate young boy, was ill suited to such work and he pleaded with his sister to run away from Giles; but even then, Andre understood that the knowledge being imparted to them had no price and that it was an opportunity that would never come again. Although Marcel did not display much of an aptitude for knightly skills, Andre responded to the training well and quickly. She learned how to control a horse while in full armor, though Giles' armor was extremely large on her and she could barely move about inside it without his assistance. She learned how to use a crossbow, how to fight with a broadsword, which she had not even been able to lift at first. She was almost constantly in pain from the demands placed on her young and undeveloped muscles, but she was possessed of intense determination. As time passed and she grew, her muscles became stronger. She became concerned when she noticed that she was beginning to develop as a woman, but the fact that she was never meant to be voluptuous, coupled with the response of her muscles to the highly intense training, resulted in her developing a body that aided her in her deception. Her breasts, though firm, were small and easily, if uncomfortably, concealed. Her shoulders, though not as broad as those of many men, were nevertheless much broader than the standards of beauty dictated for women. Her arms were large for a woman and her legs did not have the coltish slimness indicative of indolence. Where women of the day were soft, Andre was hard. Where their skin was smooth, Andre's was rough. In short, as a woman, Andre de la Croix was too mannish to attract very many men and, indeed, she would have intimidated them. But in the aspect of a man, she gave the impression of possessing a studied, languid grace, a trim and compact body and a youthful prettiness that gave her a very boyish quality and frequently made others underestimate her. When Giles succumbed to pneumonia, Andre and Marcel buried him in the forest and Andre took his horse and arms for her own. She applied the skills that Giles had taught her and improved upon them, selling her services to anyone who could afford to pay. In time, she was able to improve upon Giles' ill-fitting armor by commissioning an armorer to craft a suit especially for her. There were many knights involved in the Crusades and they proclaimed this by wearing the cross upon their chests and shields. Andre instructed her armorer to fashion a cross as a device for her, as well, only to make it different from those worn by the Crusaders. The armorer gave her a fleury cross and reversed the colors of the Crusaders from red on white to white on red and the red knight, Andre de la Croix, was born.